Get "Unable to connect to world" or just stays on "Loading resource packs" when joining Realm after uploading a world

I started experiencing this issue last night on a friend's realm. When I try to join the realm I just get the error message "Unable to connect to world." Him and I have tried everything possible but nothing has fixed the problem so far.

Same here

Me to on my own realm.

POSSIBLE FIX: remove ALL global resources out of your personal minecraft game, leaving just the original MC textures in. Try joining the realm again. It worked for me, I don't know about anyone else.

Me and my friends encountered this issue on a Realm recently. We've ended up abandoning the Realms system altogether as due to this bug and another that renders the Realm unplayable for one or more members, it's not worth the hassle.

Hello, Ricky!

I have this problem on servers, if you want to join. Just wait for a

minute, if it doesn’t work. Please tell me, I’ll be watching this issue, thanks!

-jace!

This happened for me! Mojang really needa did this!

Note: The game, might need some time to load. This happens on MINECRAFT Servers.

Me and my friends are also encountering the Unable to Connect to World after the Loading Resource Pack. This has been happening the whole day today. 

The recent mass outage that also shows this error is tracked in REALMS-3921, not here.

This issue has happened to me just now as well.  I was disconnected from a current session.  Received this message when trying to reconnect.  It took about 15 minutes before I was able t o connect and it appears that I lost about 30 minutes of building so perhaps the server failed and a backup was restored?  Unsure.

Thank you for your report!
However, this issue has been temporarily closed as Awaiting Response

Is this still an issue in the latest version? If so, could you please provide a copy of the world save that is causing the "stuck on loading" screen?

This ticket will automatically reopen when you reply.

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I had this happen on my realm. I quit my realm, then selected a different local world and clicked "Play on Realms". The game exported and uploaded the world to my Realms subscription, then tried to join it. After a couple of minutes it timed out and game me the "Unable to connect" message. I immediately tried to join from the Joinable Realms part of the world list and easily succeeded.

I then checked the Backups screen and saw that a backup had occurred 2 minutes earlier. I think the problem may have been that it was backing up the previous realm world when I tried to upload and join the second world. It actually did upload and replace the old realm world, but maybe the backup and upload functions are uncoordinated and one is overwriting the other, or the join function is using outdated realm information from before the backup.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open a world on Realms.

2. Save and quit.

3. Select a local world from your worlds list and click Play on Realms.

Expected result: The new world is uploaded and you join it.

Actual result: The new world is uploaded, but when you join it you time out with the "Failed to connect" message.

I can attach a copy of the worlds I tested with, if you want.

I am continuing to have this issue after weeks of trying to figure out with minecraft support....they even sent me to nintendo, who sent me back to minecraft, they now sent me here. I get this error on my switch and cannot connect, i can connect via my xbox count ok. My little brother seems to have no issue connecting via his switch so im not sure why it seems like it's just me? 

@unknown: Could you please add some further explanation? I've never seen or used the Switch platform and I know there are differences, but it's hard to remember what they are. My recollection from past bugs is that you can sign in by either your Microaoft account or your Nintendo Online account, and some features don't work the same both ways. So which account lets you connect and which doesn't, and by your "xbox count" do you mean your Xbox Live account (which I think has now been renamed to Xbox Online)?

Something else you might want to try is clearing out old cached resource packs, which may be causing a compatibility issue if the Realms world is using a different version than your Switch is. On my PC, I clear out cached packs from Settings > Storage, but I don't know if it works the same way on the Switch.

The reason why I send my comment, the problem I had previously appeared again on my server, I am the one who hired the service and it happens that I returned to Happen

Basically it just randomly happens when I try to connect to any realm or mutliplayer world.

I found out that I can bypass this issue by loading any local save then click "save and exit", and only then I can connect to the realms or multiplayer worlds.

And then if it happens again, i have to do the before mentioned steps again to be able to connect.

@unknown: Thanks, that's very helpful both as a possible workaround and as a clue to where the developers need to look to find the bug! I will pass it on.

I can see a flash of "Download resource pack" windows sometime, I got reports from other players that if you're lucky enough to click on the "Download" button, and downloaded successfully, you can join, otherwise you'll get the "Unable to connect to world " error again and again

@MandanaM 's solution seems not to work for me

@AkameMoe You can also try to reset your internet options, search for them in your search bar then go to advanced tab, and click on reset internet options. Sometimes it also helps.

I'm really confused... I'm kinda new to Minecraft and I'm not sure how everything works. can anyone who found a solution explain it to me because I'm a noob? Also I don't always get the unable to connect message, I  just sit in the realms loading screen forever. my friends say that it says i've joined the game from their pov but i haven't.

We are not able to provide personal assistance via the bug tracker, so you might want to visit Community Support for help.

In my case - i have a realm for 10 ppl - and i can play without any problem on Realms on any device (pc, ps4, tablet, switch). But my friend with whom i want to play if he tries to connect to realm he gots that error 'unnable to connect' and it also throws me out from realm. he is playing from PS4 slim, and i know we was using Natural Textures pack.

As a general tip, you might try simplifying by removing all texture packs from the Realm itself. Players should be able to use their local packs if desired instead of having to load from the realm.

that step is already done , there is no any additional texture packs on the realm.

It seems I can get into by adding on all the resource and behavior packs, but after adding those packs, I still need to try again and again for luck

p.s. I also tried to reset internet, no help

In my opinion, I think the problem is caused by a UDP packet send or receive order error. If the resource/behavior package info packet is sent or received before the play status packet (or things like that), maybe it'll cause the problem. Just a simple guess 🙂

It may even be an issue regarding "xbox" servers, i have a latency of 200ms on any realm no matter its location. So perhaps a latency or packet loss issue.

I found out solution for my case and this is the steps that i done:

Steps that happened on my friends PS4.

1 - Deactivated resource pack (NATURAL TEXTURE PACK https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/pdp?id=167a11c3-759b-4eaa-b898-5d85dbbd7f5c)  - Still can't connect.

2 - Made a backup of saves files to external Pendrive.

3 - reinstalling a game without removing save files from PS4. Problem to connect to Realms still existed.

4 - removed all saved files. IT WORKED. i could connect to our realms - but world there was new and we wanted to play on my firends local save.

5 - copied to PS4 save with world. There was multiple files in those saves - one of those have world miniature and some others don't. and we copied only one file with the world.

6. uploaded that world to Realms. After 30 mintutes it stated working - world have 500 mb and it took some time to start.

7. re-downloaded resource pack and activated it back.

8. Still it works on Realms.

for me it looks like that some resource pack have some impact even it was deactivated. Removing all saved files from PS4 fixed issue(only minecraft saves - not from other games ! :d). After connecting to realms its safe to re-install resource pack.

@Maciej, 

I just checked your repro and i think it's not working. It looks like you might randomly connect or not connect regardless of the actions you mentioned.

Why is this still unassigned? This has been a problem for 18 months! 

Mojang only uses the "Assignee" field for Java-Realms. So for bedrock realms, the Assignee will never be set, but that does not mean the issue is not being worked on.

Nice that my comment about compensations for this bug has been deleted - it's nice from your side. Maybe you should also delete receipt for not fully functioning service that you are selling? 

Anyway there is no working solution for that problem after last upgrade.

now i tried::

1. Download backup from realm to my friend PS4 who is the owner of the Realm. 

2. Remove all resource packs from world and from Storage (maybe you should block possiblity to upload worlds with resource packs if its not working? just some idea.)

3. Restart the world on the Realm to brand new without anything.

4. Login to realm to make sure that is new world there. log out.

5. Run the backup world offline - to make sure there is no resource packs.

6. upload it to the realm.

7. on my:
   PC - works
   PS5 - doesn't work
   galaxy s6 tab - doesn't work
   Galaxy m51 - doesn't work
   Nitendo Swtich - doesn't work
   $7.99 monthly - gone from my account.

@unknown: The bug tracker is not a customer support site and cannot help you with anything but bug reports. As explained in our guidelines, comments are for providing information to the developers that might help them find and fix the bug. We also allow sharing of workarounds. But this is not a discussion or support site and off-topic comments are subject to removal as disruptive to the bug tracker's purpose.

Hey all.

So, I've been struggling with this issue also and have spent almost a year now trying every workaround I can think of (some of them briefly successful, listed below) and have found a bunch of interesting parameters that may either be useful for further fixing attempts for smarter people or useful for devs fixing the bug. I have literally created an account here just to post my findings. I will add that I primarily play on Nintendo Switch, where I first encountered this bug, but it seems to have spread to my PC, Phone and PS4 versions of Bedrock Edition, so it appears to be an issue with my account or the world file or a mix of both. Local worlds work fine, and I can even play online multiplayer, just not on the realm. I also just want to point out before I begin that out of every few tries detailed below, if I left it long enough it would eventually log me in, however it would only load the chunk I was in when I last played, not all sounds would work, and I couldn't access the inventory or crafting screens, other players couldn't see me (though I could see them moving in real-time) and any blocks edited would be reverted when I next logged in, I felt like a ghost.

Anyway, from the very beginning. this issue appeared out of the blue after a couple months of owning a realm, I was not using any resource packs (none 'active') but had some packs attached to my account in the 'My Packs' section from my Xbox360 minecraft days. These included the 'Super Mario Mashup' resources pack and 'Natural Textures' Pack.

Since it stuck on 'loading resource packs' I tried replacing the texture pack on the realm with one that I had gotten free with Realms Plus, I noticed that I had two copies of 'Natural Textures' resource pack in the 'My Packs' section, and the titles were scrambled into what looked like hashcode (0x_ random string of numbers and letters). This change of resource pack however worked and I continued my merry playing.

This issue reared up again several months later and I still couldn't pinpoint anything that felt like a particular cause. I tried the same fix and swapped out the resource pack, noticing now that ALL my resource packs, including all of the realms plus ones, had scrambled titles and this time this fix didn't work, I tried reloading the game a couple times and also noticed that any changes to the realms settings were reverted upon going back to the worlds screen, and so I figured that the resource pack changes I was making weren't actually changing server side, only client side.

I then tried changing the pack and clicking play on the same settings screen without going back to the world select, this worked intermittently but I would have to do this every single time I played, and it wasn't guaranteed to work, the times it succeeded decreased exponentially and eventually stopped altogether. Then a small miracle, I was trying this method when I received a pop-up that said 'this realm uses a resource a pack. Do you want to download it?' or something similar, I clicked yes, it did the download and I was in! It then continued to work as normal for another couple of months⚠️ and I thought it had been fixed entirely, but then it came back yet again randomly. This is the point where I noticed it could be being triggered by my console going to sleep while logged into the realm.

For another couple of months I fought with it, and every time that same pop-up appeared, it would lead to a month or more of completely normal functionality, but I could not find a reliable method of forcing it to appear, and clicking 'force players to download resource packs' tickbox didn't seem to effect the odds. I found changing my global resources in from the main menu (not for the realm) had no effect on the odds of this popup appearing. I did however find that the process of deleting the currently active resource pack (using the little green tick on the right) and then installing and activating another (all in the same session) seemed to improve my chances. Then the green tick stopped appearing (instead replaced with a little loading animation), but I found that installing the effected pack again via the store page would allow me to then delete it, leaving the 'active packs' section empty for a new one to be installed and activated. This was exhausting but at least I could play again.

Finally, after several more months of random periods of functionality, all of these workarounds stopped working and the resource pack pop-up just stopped appearing altogether. It was during this time that I also tried completely deleting and uninstalling Minecraft from all affected devices, I tried wiping all my save data, I moved all of my worlds onto a USB and wiped literally everything. I then reinstalled, logged back in on each device and all of them were still affected (even before I moved any worlds or other data back).

It was then that one of my friends who had listened to my rants about this issue offered to buy a realm and upload my world file onto it. I accepted and we did all the transferring. Sadly, this initially did not fix my issue which doubled down my belief that it was my account or the world file or both. I retried ALL of these fixes again, not a single one of them worked, which nearly caused me and my friends to walk away from realms entirely, and Mojang support endlessly repeated that it was not possible for them to troubleshoot individual realms and could not help. I had no other options left and almost gave up, but then my subscription ended, my realms content was removed and I had one final idea. I tried uninstalling and wiping all my Minecraft data, including my save data (backed it up elsewhere) on my Switch now that I had none of the online elements still attached to my account and suddenly it started working again like normal and has not yet returned, even though I have occasionally let my Switch go to sleep when logged into the realm!

At the time of writing it has not returned at all on my Switch, however, every other device still has this issue and I believe it's due to my inability to fully wipe all of Minecraft's data from them. I have tried uninstalling the Win10 App but have noticed that when I re-download it, I'm already logged in and deleting the app's files from the correct area of the AppData folder (not the .Minecraft in 'Roaming', it's under 'Packages' in 'Local') does not change this or fix the issue.

I really hope this helps in some way!

TL;DR

-Try changing your realm's resource pack, if that doesn't work

-Try changing the texture pack and clicking play from the settings screen, if that doesn't work

-Try the above AND accepting the popup that asks you to download said texture pack, if that doesn't work,

-Try deleting any installed texture packs using the little green arrow to the right of the deactivate button and installing a fresh one, if that doesn't work,

-Try installing, activating and deleting a texture pack and then installing and activating a different one. If that doesn't work,

-Try wiping Minecraft from your affected device entirely, even save data (back it up!), if that doesn't work,

-Try to find a friend or relative who will use their Minecraft account to run your realm from, if that doesn't work,

-Try waiting until your subscription ends and realms plus content is removed, then try the above steps again. If that doesn't work

-Try upvoting and commenting here with how your issue arose and help the devs fix this once and for all!

Just a small addition, the issue has now come back yet again on my switch. It appears to be triggered by being kicked from the server when the server updates in some way. Today my Minecraft app updated and then less than 30 mins later I was kicked from the server with the words ‘disconnected from server’ in-game, and ‘a communication error occurred’ through the Switch interface. Then the issue returned. 

@unknown: This is normal behavior around the time regular releases update. It's caused by the fact that all devices are not updated at precisely the same time, and Realms generally gets updated a day or so after other platforms. The problem is inevitable, but should resolve itself within a day. If it doesn't, it might need more attention, but as of now I think this is just expected behavior.

Depending on your device and settings, you might be able to postpone updating your release of Minecraft for a day or so, in which case you would minimize the out-of-sync condition that causes this.

By the way, please note that the bug tracker is not a discussion board. Comments are intended for providing additional information to the developers, and we also allow sharing workarounds in comments because (as you noted yourself) those are often helpful to the devs as well, but in general please avoid directly addressing other users of the site. I left your long comment because I know it took you a lot of time to develop it and because it appeared to have considerable technical detail, but my first instinct was to remove it because it gives advice to our users. It's fine that you want to help others, but a better place to do that is the Community Support Discord where it doesn't distract the devs from the information they need.

Thanks for the info, have joined the discord. 

This problem does persist for several months after any kind of update, on every device I log into with my account. Seems to be something I have purchased on my account or is connected to my account, the workarounds I have found are always temporary and the issue comes back if triggered by updates or any changes to my resource packs. So far the only workaround has been completely deleting the app and save data and again, this is only temporary. Hope this helps the devs even further. 

Have you tried clicking Cancel and trying again? When I see it stall, it's usually like it just forgot what it was doing. It's pretty easy to get past the problem that way and no damage is done by retrying.

I tend to have the problem with large resource packs, such as the complete replacement texture packs. It happens when I add a Realms Plus texture pack to the Realm rather than when I attach it to my local world, then try to upload the world and pack together.

Thanks for the continued responses. I have retried many many many times, and have tried waiting it out. As described in the main post, 9/10 times I try and retry it just pops up with the error ‘unable to connect to the realm. Please check your internet connection or network settings’. My internet is fine and I can play online (not on realms) with friends with no issue.

The other 1/10 times I wait, I’ll get into the realm but only the chunks I was in/nearby when I logged out last will load, I can’t open the inventory or place blocks and I don’t hear any sounds when walking or mining. I can see my friends moving in real time but for them I’m standing still where I last logged out. 

I should mention I am not using any sort of resource pack, and the realm has no pack on it either, but I do have two packs in the ‘My Packs Section’ that seem corrupted (the names are often just a jumbled series of numbers and letters that look like hash codes). These are the Super Mario Mashup pack and the Natural Textures pack, the latter has been brought up in earlier comments but not sure how relevant that is. 

I have EXACTLY this problem and its so frustrating. Even happens as realm owner, and I've had the issue since I can remember lol. I got around it using a VPN on Windows 10 Edition but its not the best fix, and cant be done on consoles. The only way I can reliably connect on console is to use an ethernet, so if you can use that you may be able to connect. 

It's interesting that you can see your friends' simulations update but they can't see yours and you can't do anything that requires the server to update your state within itself. It's consistent with a theory that you're not sending proper packets to the server, although I know almost nothing about the details of the network protocol and can only guess why that might be. Normally I'd suggest reinstalling the game but you've already done that. The next thing I'd suggest is checking your router and firewall settings. I know you think that because your internet generally works fine, it can't be anything in your network settings, but that's a false assumption. There are all kinds of ways it could be wrong and only affect one app or one kind of connection. Router settings could be configured to redirect packets you're sending to the server to a wrong IP address for instance, or to discard them, and no other app would be affected. Similarly, a local firewall could block outbound traffic from Minecraft only. Neither of those would affect anything else, and neither would be something Mojang could fix for you.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily the cause of your problems, only that it might be, or might be part of the cause. I can tell you, though, that if you have such a problem, waiting for it to be fixed as a result of this ticket isn't going to work. You might want to try Ryan's solution of using a VPN, at least to see what happens, because using a VPN means that you're going through a different network routing path that would avoid IP addresses that your router or firewall might be blocking. In other words, if using a VPN bypasses the problem, it's a pretty strong indicator that a bug is not to blame.

Thanks for the recommendation Ryan and the continued support Auldrick! I have encountered some very strange things trying these suggestions. I tried taking my laptop and switch to a friends house to see if it may have been my router settings, and the problem persisted, so I don’t think it’s specifically my router, and I asked a friend to try and connect to the realm on their device using my router and the problem wasn’t present. I also have some devices, my ipad and phone, that can connect to the realm no issue on my router.

However, I then tried using a VPN on the effected laptop and it worked! This narrowed down the issue and I decided to turn it off again and investigate my network settings to see if I could work out how to get it working without a VPN. Opened up all the network settings to do with Minecraft and saw no issues being flagged, the app had the permissions to send and receive on my private network, tried turning off both the in-built windows defender firewall and my antivirus firewall and that didn’t solve the issue. I also tried resetting the effected devices’ network settings entirely, no dice. I’m looking into changing the ports Minecraft uses or trying to discern if my router is blocking certain ports Minecraft uses, but, why would a factory reset on my switch resolve the issue on that device if the issue was based in my router? Why would the issue persist to other routers (such as my friend’s) on affected devices if it were a blocked IP/Port on my router? Why would the Minecraft realms connections my friend’s devices and my unaffected devices make not also get blocked, even using my router? What do resource packs have to do with any of this? Every time I feel like I get one thing narrowed down I get many more questions! 

With all these findings all piled up together and as well as the last couple posts worth of toribleshooting, I can’t help but feel that unexpected disconnections while on a realm can cause some kind of corruption of Minecraft’s network data or in some way corrupts/changes/messes with a specific device’s network connection/settings for Minecraft, that then persists even if that device is used on other networks, and only deep resets or bypasses of this issue can fix the problem. But that doesn’t really account for why once one device was affected, it quickly spread to almost every other device I play Minecraft on (affected devices are Win10 Laptop, Win10 Desktop, Playstation 4 and Switch). The only constant factor across this entire thing has been that all these issues have been from one account, I have another account so will try to see if that also has the same issue, but if it is my account, why on earth does a VPN connection rectify the issue? 

@unknown: You've certainly been working diligently on the problem! And you've apparently found out some things that the devs might find enlightening as they continue searching for solutions to this problem, so I'm glad you included your thoughts about what you've found.

Unfortunately, we can't troubleshoot this with you on the bug tracker, but sharing your experiments and findings with Mojang is bound to give them new paths to search for solutions to this problem.

One thing I'll mention is that you might be relying too heavily on the simplified view of a VPN as a transparent intermediary. That's a true model at the OSI application layer, but not at the lower layers where the settings we've been talking about have effect. It's likely that lots of session control parameters are different depending on the method you use to connect, so remember to stay open minded.

I'll also mention that your Super Mario Mashup pack could be part of the problem, maybe even the whole problem. If I remember correctly, that pack was originally licensed on a console edition, and you retained your license to it after upgrading to Bedrock through some special arrangement. But it's not actually a Marketplace pack, right? And your rights under its license aren't necessarily the same as for content purchased from the Marketplace. I don't know enough about the license terms to say anything definitive about it, but this wouldn't be the first time that the special status of the Super Mario Mashup pack in Bedrock caused a problem.

This ticket might ultimately result in Mojang changing something in the game that fixes your problem, but there's no way to know how long that might take. In the meantime, I'd encourage you to keep studying it and trying different things. You might happen on a solution that's good enough, for you at least.